He’s one of the nation’s leading advocates for stricter gun laws, but Mayor Bloomberg today refused to support a newspaper’s decision to publish the names and addresses of weapons permit holders.

It wasn’t an easy call.

“My instincts would be no, but I can’t give you a good argument,” the mayor said on his weekly WOR radio show.

He noted that the information is public and publication was protected by the First Amendment.

“The public owns the data,” he said. “On the other hand I’m not so sure we should go publish everybody’s tax return…or everybody’s psychiatric records if they have dealings with a public hospital. Do we really want that?”

Those records, however, are considered private and are not made public.

The Journal News created a furor when it published a map with the names and addresses of weapons permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties.

The information was obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Another upstate county, Putnam, won’t provide its gun data to the newspaper.